A Jewish human rights organisation has written to Amazon Prime, asking it to remove Bawaal from its platform for its “insensitive portrayal” of the Holocaust. The Simon Wiesenthal Center says that the film trivialises the “suffering and systematic murder of millions”.
In Bawaal, a parallel has been drawn between the love story of the protagonists (Varun Dhawan and Janhvi Kapoor) and the Holocaust. It uses the gas chamber, Hitler and the Auschwitz death camp of World War II as metaphors.
The Jewish organisation said in a statement on July 25 that “Auschwitz should not be used as a metaphor as it’s a quintessential example of man’s capacity for evil. By having the protagonist in this movie declare that ‘Every relationship goes through their Auschwitz’, director Nitesh Tiwari trivialises and demeans the memory of six million murdered Jews and millions of others who suffered at the hands of Hitler’s genocidal regime.”